The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Legacy air cooled data centers may suffer from one or more limitations, for example, limited energy efficiency, low component density, lack of waste heat recovery capability, high operating costs, and/or a high data center footprint. On the other hand, liquid cooling may offer the benefits of increased energy efficiency, higher component density, enablement of waste heat recovery, and relatively low operating cost. However, the benefits of liquid cooling may be offset by the large initial capital expenditure needed to retrofit existing air cooled installations, as well as reliability concerns over bringing a fluid such as water close to electronic components.
Therefore, immersion cooling methods that may use different types of dielectric fluids such as mineral oil may offer increased energy efficiency benefits. However, the immersion cooling methods may still have challenges around high fluid cost or serviceability. Also, single phase immersion cooling technologies may have poor heat transfer characteristics owing to a relatively high Prandtl number associated with dielectric fluids. For example the Prandtl number associated with the dielectric fluids may be higher than the Prandtl number of air, which may be approximately 0.7.